is it possible to create a virtual drive in RAM ?

[AlinaVastag84]

I have a lot of softs that use the hard disk to work . If i could do a virtual drive in my RAM i could easeup the job of the hard disk, and obtain also a higher speed for those programs. I have 4 Gb of memory and it`s very cheap to upgrade to 6 if necessary. Please help me.

[jagabo]

Yes, there are lots of RAM disk packages you can install and use.
http://www.google.com/search?q=ramdisk+xp

[jman98]

Yes, it is possible. I use this product:
http://members.fortunecity.com/ramdisk/RAMDisk/ramdrivmain.htm
It works very well, you get free upgrades, and the config tool is very easy to use.

I am not aware of any free software products that can do this. I will warn you that in my experience using the RAM disk isn't really as fast as I hoped it would be, but it still may be worthwhile for you.

[neomaine]

I didn't think you could address more than 2gb on WinXP...

[jagabo]

free: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server/

[AlinaVastag84]

Thankyou everyone, i`ve allready searched google , but only old stuff there, I was anoyed by the sound my HDD is doing when working with winrar (very often with my torrents) and many games. They all have the possibility to set the drive and folder for work, but all theyr work dissapears anyway when the job is done. I tryed a 4 gigs SD memory witch is anyway in my memoryreader allways, but the speed is bad, only 10 Mb/sec. Thankyou all again.

[poisondeathray]

I've used a few of them.

The only free one I know of is Gavotte ramdisk

The professional ones are Qsoft, Superspeed, Cenatek which have other features like saving disk images to HD upon shutdown, making backup images, etc... You cannot use them as a system disc (i.e. can't boot off them)

You should use ECC memory with these apps (ie. most server boards), especially if the data is important

[redwudz]

You would need a 64bit OS to address more than about 3.7GB of RAM. Adding more won't do much of anything with a 32bit OS.

If your aim is faster operation, encoding, I would get a fast quad core CPU, 3Ghz or so, 1066Mhz or faster RAM, and two or more hard drives. That would be better than trying to configure a RAM drive.

[AlinaVastag84]

Thankyou verymuch " poisondeathray" !!! the soft you recomended is the best ! it realy did my day ! that Gavotte ramdisk is supercool ! First , i had problems with the letters of the drives since last year ( i have inside the PC all the HDD i bought in the last 10 years , and most of them have 3 partitions. The memory cardreader eats 4 letters . Long story short i can use now the B letter (it`s the RAMDISK of 2 Gb) !!! What can it be used to ? First of all, if i wanna see a movie 3 hours long, i copy the 1.4 Gb file in the B drive (took me 20 seconds), i go in POWER SCHEMES in windows and set the harddisks to turnoff in 3 minutes (took me 5 seconds) than watch the movie with the HDD stopped. Second use, i have a camera with a memory card, i have a 8G stick inside it. If i put it inside my cardreader in the PC and start the software to convert the file into a avi (divx) and set the quality to high, it takes me 5 hours to create the avi file. Now i can let the PC do it overnite and create the 2 of 700 Mb files in the B drive (RAMDISC) , so that all HDD will be stopped all night. Third use is with the winrar, i hate when it works like a dog in one drive, than copy the file in the place i ment (it`s about 1G vob files from DVDs got from the torrents that works with thousands of bits and pieces). Without mention about seeding those thousands pieces to other peers...Poor HDDs...Forth use is with my favourite game SECOND LIFE which can kill a HDD in one year (no joke, happened to me). Fifth use, if i want to copy a disk with NERO , i copy first the files in the B drive(RAMDISK) than start burning from the ram (no ruined disks from now on because of scratches on the source disc). I had closed the SWAP file 3 years ago since i had 2 Gigs of memory and i had no problems. Now a 2Gb DDR2 is 30$, and i have 2x2Gb inside the PC and 1 slot free. A normal HDD consumes 20 Watt/hour and they only heats my room and make noise.

[jagabo]

I used to use a ramdisk similarly. But every now and then I'd have to unrar or download a file that was bigger than the ramdisk and the operations would fail because the ramdisk filled up. Eventually it became too much of a PITA.

[AlinaVastag84]

Since i bought my Geforce 8500 GT UltraSilentCooling Video card and the powersource with huge fan (completly silent too) i came to the fact that the HDD (at list the older ones) are noisy (i have 4 in my PC). I have a dream now , unlike Obama`s. I dream at a 8Gigs ram of which 6 G for my beloved "Gavotte ramdisk" i started to use today. For now it only lets me set the B drive RAMDISK to 3 Gigs. Maybe next year it will update because i realy wish to be able to work with my ISO files of 4.5 Gigs from DVDs. The Winrar kills my HDDs when i open them.
later edit
Funny, it never crossed my mind to look upon XP to see how much memory it shows, and i did now (i usualy work on Vista 64 i have as a bonus dvd from a laptop) so: i have 4 Gigs of memory on Vista and 3 Gigs on XP ??? this is realy funny.

[AlinaVastag84]

Hello all, i`m back for something i found on internet about this problem. Its on http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php
and it says that :
qoute:
"RamDisk Plus 11 has a most unique feature. Our patent pending technology can access memory beyond the limitation imposed by a Windows 32-bit operating system! In other words, RamDisk Plus 11 can use "unmanaged" Windows' memory e.g. above 4GB. It can also use the stubbornly inaccessable memory between 3.2GB and 4GB."
It seems impossible for me to understand how something running inside windows OS can use aditional memory over those 3 gigs. Can somebody explain me how would that be possible? I guess that by now, milions of people have that extra memory , and cant use it on windows 32bit OS. Thankyou !

[jagabo]

It seems impossible for me to understand how something running inside windows OS can use aditional memory over those 3 gigs. Can somebody explain me how would that be possible?

It's possible for 32 bit operating systems and processors to access more than 4 GB of physical memory using Physical Address Extension (PAE).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

[ps2daddy]

Ever thought about booting from an internal solid state HD?
That thought has crossed my mine but I havent done it yet.

Newegg has a bunch
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=636&name=SSD

[AlinaVastag84]

The problem appeared when i started using Win 7. With that Ram Drive from Gavote i had speeds like gigabytes/second (tested with drive speed testers). I used that virtual drive for the cache of net browsers, games and some editors. Now on Win 7 many softwares don`t work. Not even in that Vista or XP emulator. Not to mention the 64bit version which is even worse. But its too late for me to go back, and i never will. Sad thing is that some small company of soft creators is able to use the extra memory on a 32bit OS, and Microsoft isn`t.

[jagabo]

Sad thing is that some small company of soft creators is able to use the extra memory on a 32bit OS, and Microsoft isn`t.

It's just a market segmentation issue. Microsoft has to reserve features for the server editions of Windows in order to charge more for them.

[AlinaVastag84]

Sounds like microsoft allrite...Look what i`ve found for FREE : its called "Dataram RAMDisk - Windows 7, Windows Vista, XP, Server" Version 3.5.130RC13a and it resolves a part of the problems. And it works perfect on my Win 7 - 64bit . Download site is http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk/download-ramdisk . The file has this name : Dataram_RAMDisk_V3.5.130RC13a if u can`t reach the site. And for 10 $ you can get the over 4 GB version (free for under 4 GB) imagine how much would microsoft charge for that. What does it uses at i wrote earlyer. The results are here :



"b" is the letter i gave the virtual RAM drive, "c" and "d" are my lovely 2 HDDs form my beloved lappy, and the "m" is the inner memory card reader with a SD card tested. I`m sure u can do better than me. Test software was CrystalDiskMark22.

[jagabo]

Sounds like microsoft allrite...

I'm not a Microsoft fanboy, but in Microsoft's defense, this type of segmentation is common in the server O/S market. In fact it's common in all tech markets. Once the software goes beyond supporting one user it's pretty much the same for 2 users to 2 million users. But they all charge by the seat and the limits on the number of seats are artificial (some secret hidden runtime setting in the O/S, or at most, an option in the source code before compiling). The same is true for the number of CPUs and cores.

With hardware, the difference between a low end product and high end product is often that the low end product has some of the hardware disabled (sometimes with something as simple as a switch or jumper on the board), or that the supporting software looks at the name in the firmware and only enables certain features for certain names. If you search around you'll find examples of people converting their 3 core AMD CPUs into 4 core CPUs, NVIDIA's normal consumer graphics cards into Quadro cards, etc.

[kpa]

You can't use PAE on a 32-bit OS unless you can verify that every single device driver is PAE compliant (in other words is aware of 36 bit addressing in kernel memory space). With windows server OSs it's possible because MS has placed very strict restrictions on what drivers can be installed on those OSs but with workstation OSs it's just impossible. Linux and other open source OSs is a different story because the source code for most of the device drivers is available and problems related to PAE can be fixed.

Edit: Technical explanation here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/pae/pae_os.mspx
(also seems to explain how a ram disk using memory over 4GB limit could work, the pse36 ram disk part)